Selected: TINSLEY, WILLIAM

Born: 1804

Died: 1885

Architect, of Clonmel, Co. Tipperary, and Cincinnati, Ohio. William Tinsley was born in Clonmel, Co. Tipperary, on 7 February 1804, a younger son of Thomas Tinsley, builder, by his wife Lucy (née Brough). In about 1820 he became an employee in the family building firm, which was by that time being run by his eldest brother JOHN TINSLEYJOHN TINSLEY . In the evenings he attended classes in mathematics at the Clonmel Endowed School. When John Tinsley fell ill and then died in November 1825, William took over the running of the firm, at the same time returning to the Clonmel Endowed School to study painting and drawing.(1) Over the next twenty years he built up a substantial practice as a builder and architect in Cos. Tipperary, Waterford and Cork, with a clientèle which included the Marquess of Waterford at Curraghmore, the Earl of Glengall at Cahir and members of the landed gentry of the area. From the mid 1840s he gave up the building side of the business and practised solely as an architect.

Although baptised into the Established Church, Tinsley converted to Methodism before he was twenty-one and remained a committed Methodist for the rest of his life. Following the reorganization of the administrative structure of the Ecclesiastical Commission in 1843, he was appointed architect to the diocese of Lismore, in succession to JAMES PAINJAMES PAIN , who had been responsible for the entire province of Cashel. He had already built several churches to Pain's designs and had sought his advice. He named his fourth son, who was born in 1844, James Pain Tinsley.

In 1851 Tinsley emigrated to the United States. The potato famine of 1847 had led to a decline in business, and Tinsley, although his own circumstances were more than adequate,(2) was anxious about the prospects of his large family - particularly his seven sons(3) - in the prevailing climate of economic uncertainty. In September 1851 he, his wife Lucy(4) and nine of their children, ranging in age from nineteen to less than a year, sailed from Waterford to Liverpool and thence to New York. They settled in Cincinnati, where Tinsley launched himself on a successful career in the mid-West when he won the competition for North Western Christian University in the winter of 1852-3.. This led to a further six commissions for substantial college buildings and eventually for the massive Institution for the Education of the Blind at Columbus, Ohio. He died in Cincinnati on 14 June 1885 in his eighty-second year and was buried at Crown Hill Cemetery, Indianapolis, beside his second wife, who had died while the family was living in that city during the 1850s.

References
All information in this entry not otherwise accounted for is from the comprehensive account of Tinsley's life and works in J.D. Forbes, Victorian Architect: the life and work of William Tinsley (Indiana University Press, 1953). This is largely based on Tinsleys manuscript autobiographical memoir, written in 1873-74, which belonged in 1953 to Tinsley's grand-daughter Jane E. Tinsley, of Crawfordsville, Indiana. The volume includes a rough draft of the autobiographical note which Tinsley wrote for publication in The Biographical Encyclopaedia of Ohio in the Nineteenth Century (1876), 551. Forbes also had access to Tinsley's 'Professional Journal and Account Memo. 1846-1849', some legal documents and photographs, collected by another descendant, William T. Stagg of Los Angeles, California. There is a brief entry on Tinsley in APSD, T, 58.

(1) An interesting example of his draughtsmanship is the sketches he made when he was serving as a juryman in the William Smith O'Brien trial in Clonmel in 1848, see J.D. Forbes, 'The Tinsley portrait sketches of the William Smith O'Brien Trial', JRSAI 83 (1953), 86ff. (2) By the time he departed for the United States, he had acquired a considerable amount of property in Clonmel, including a house in William St, a house in Mary St, two houses in New Street, and eight houses in Cahir Street as well as his own house, Adelaide Cottage. (3) He envisaged a career in architecture for his eldest son, Charles, born in 1832, who is presumably the Charles Tinsley who was admitted to the Royal Dublin Society;'s School of Drawing in Architecture on 5 November 1846. (4) His first wife, Ellen MacCarthy, died of tuberculosis after two years of marriage. He then married her cousin Lucy MacCarthy, who died in 1857 in Indianapolis. His third marriage, to Mary Eliza Nixon, ended in estrangement. He fathered seventeen children by his three wives.